On Reading

Writing on Reading (a concept review)

A. J. Jacobs. The Know-It-All (2004).

-compared with-

Sara Nelson. So Many Books, So Little Time (2003).

Let us say that writing to communicate with others is a noble and worthy endeavor. Therefore, by extension, reading these communications is also noble and also, at least, potentially worthy. Hopefully, then, what can be more laudatory than writing about reading and reading those writings?

As adults, we likely approach the act of reading with two mentalities that co-exist even though they may struggle for dominance. Reading is a personal experience, for sure; reading is also for learning. Practically and professionally, we extol reading for its carriage of cultural heritage and knowledge. Personally, we relish reading because it gives us more enjoyment, discovery and insight than we gain from experience alone.

This mix of the social and selfish views is within me. And because of the jostling between them, I always want to explore the reading phenomenon more and more. Reading, its amount, purpose and efficacy, seems always to be in question, yet perhaps never before to the extent than it is right now. In the last half-dozen years, scores of books have taken up the subject. By happy accident, two of them fell into my lap by wondrous coincidence at the same time. Following opportunity, I read and considered them in sequence. I expected them to be complementary, maybe even harmonious, ever wishful that I am.

A.J. Jacobs, a writer and editor at Esquire, took on ‘Operation Britannica’ to read the 2002 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. As a fan of the mighty EB since my public librarian first helped me use it when I was about age eleven and had a question on Genghis Khan, I eagerly sought Jacobs’ book after seeing it noted in a remainder catalog. I wondered what the experience of reading the encyclopedia to gain knowledge was like. I taught reference services 21 times in my library career and always featured encyclopedias and the EB. I knew that EB, more than any other current encyclopedia, held to the idea that the Greeks had – the encyclopedia is the circle of knowledge.

Sara Nelson, a writer and editor at Glamour, planned a ‘Reading Year Project,’ whereby she would get through a book a week. She considered all those books she had meant to read for a long time as well as those that reviews, friends, and bookstore displays brought to her attention. I found a promo copy of her book in the fifty cent cart of clutter at my favorite used book store. Instantly, I saw Nelson as an inveterate reader and a practiced reviewer. She set out to do what all conscientious readers seek to do – follow their lists and piles of the unread. Nelson had reflectively chronicled her responses to what she read. And I had to know what she found.

In The Know-It-All: one man’s quest to become the smartest person in the world (2004), Jacobs sets forth his motivations. He seeks to recover an education lost to the past and restore a mind overrun with trivia from his years at Entertainment Weekly. Mostly, he wants to gain intelligence. When his Aunt Marti questions the supposition that amount of knowledge makes mental ability, he begins his defense. Knowledge equips intelligence with more reserves, he argues; knowledge exposes options and makes for flexibility in thinking. Likely many of us have thought this way ourselves.

In So Many Books, So Little Time: a year of passionate reading (2003), Nelson confesses her addiction to reading. She credits her father for teaching her to read, her mother for setting a reading example, her studious and critical sister, Liza Nelson, for bringing hundreds of books to her attention that she otherwise would have missed. Nelson’s world is made up of books, reading and relations to writers, other readers, the publishing field, as well as to non-readers especially her husband, or to emerging readers, namely her young son. Because Nelson is a professional reviewer and regards her book a week plan as time away from work, she takes a personal approach to each book. Consequently, there are no reviews in the traditional sense, but instead fifty wonderfully contextual and delightful crafted personal essays about reading as a lived experience.

When the editors of EB totally overhauled a two-hundred year old institution into the 15th edition of what became The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, they vaulted the educational purposes of the encyclopedia to its heights by a radical design into three parts. The Propaedia outlines in one volume all the article contents as a system of knowledge providing integration and direction. The Macropaedia (large learning) features the major articles with longer essays, some of them book-length, that bring related matters together. The Micropaedia (small learning) contains short articles including summaries of the major articles, none of them longer than 750 words, and the remaining miscellany that answers fact questions enmeshed with the detailed indexing of the set. Jacobs, however, disregards all this apparatus and reads through the encyclopedia alphabetically.

Most of Jacobs' report is accordingly an alphabetical hopscotch through a chaos of articles, A-Z. From the start, he says (p. 11), “One of my biggest challenges is figuring out how to shoehorn my new found knowledge into conversations. Naturally, I want to show off.” Such a penchant for the relatively meaningless becomes hard to shake. He meets Ron, who labors to understand philosophy and writes about it at length (p. 244). “He asks me what I have learned in the encyclopedia. I figure I should give him a philosophy fact.” Jacobs tells Ron, Descartes had a fixation for cross-eyed women.

I found only three selections that displayed any satisfactory depth, the articles encyclopedias, intelligentsia, and thinking. More troubling to me is how Jacobs could have read the 2002 edition, 44 million words, written it up and been published in 2004. He says little about his method except that he tried to read at every opportunity, complicated by the weight of lugging heavy volumes around. He investigated speed-reading but gave up on it as a sham. He reports that by the first 30 hours of reading he had reached “Amethyst.” This is equivalent to roughly 45-50,000 words an hour.

While Jacobs had amazing powers of dedication to plan, Nelson shows little consistency in sticking to her own proposal. She read routinely, but not always as intended. Often the book she planned to read in any given week did not fit the setting, mood, or competing interests of how she found herself at the moment. Family and friends pressed other books on her; past books once read suggested others found to be more alluring. She chose to read in tandem with her son when he needed encouragement so they could discuss together what they each read by themselves. Eight year old Charlie remarked about Charlotte’s Web, ‘I don’t like it, Mom. It’s about a girl and a pig. Why should I care?” But, they persevered. Charlie read it and liked it, because he saw it was a book about himself and others that he knows. Such is the motivation of most readers.

Nelson has wonderfully wise and astute things to say about the timeliness of reading, about gaining perspective and agility over time, about why Dickens or Wharton or Philip Roth or just about anyone else (she explains why Truman Capote is different) write all their books in the same vein. It’s their “sensibility,” the way they see the world and express that vision. Nelson makes clear that there is little reason to force yourself to read what others think you should read and you, however much you respect them as persons, can hardly bear their reading choices.

Nevertheless, two things happened for me in my reading of Nelson. I came to see how she reacted to books and why, and I could scale her reactions through my own filter, and decide where we connected. So when she said The Bridges of Madison County and Tuesday at Morrie’s were over-hyped and underachieving, I was glad that I had not bothered with them. I did not go for all her enthusiasms, but she definitely whetted my appetite. I wrote down ten books that I had been out of sync with and will at least investigate. I missed Norah Ephron’s Heartburn many years ago, but what she had to say about it made me so curious, I have been on the lookout for it ever since.

By the same token, nothing Jacobs wrote made me want to dive into the EB any more than I feel I already need or want to do. (I did look up, though, the origin of hot cross buns on Good Friday morning before we had them for breakfast.). At the end, Jacobs considers summing up his experience in one sentence and finds he cannot. But he does write a long paragraph in conclusion, a mix of wise realization and more trivia. “I know that everything is connected like a worldwide version of the six-degrees-of-separation game. I know that history is simultaneously a bloody mess and a collection of feats so inspiring and amazing they make you proud to share the same DNA structure with the rest of humanity… I know that opossums have thirteen nipples. I know I’ve contradicted myself a hundred times over the last year, and that history has contradicted itself thousands of times.” And finally, “I know that knowledge and intelligence are not the same thing – but they do live in the same neighborhood. I know once again, firsthand, the joy of learning.”

And I’ve learned that it’s harder to learn from someone you constantly question, than from someone you sincerely appreciate. And shared experience, even through reading, is more salable then keen reporting.

Mostly, I am confirmed that reading is a good thing, especially so because it is not all one thing.
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© 2005, 2009 by Roger Sween

The Jacobs and Nelson reviews when contributed to MACAE’s Update were instead chosen for the new joint publication of the Minnesota Association for Continuing Adult Education and the Minnesota Independent Scholars Forum and published as “Writing on Reading: What might be learned from two books,” Practical Thinking v.1 no.1 (July 2005) 8-9, 12. That article is here slightly revised, chiefly to alter it for a more general audience.

I welcome substantive comments on the contents of this blog. Personal comments to me may be made at my email address, rogdesk@charter.net.